Not that I am very much puzzled: Back then, when testing the SOtM switch in combination with the 10 megahertz clock, Oliver Goebel dropped by out of pure curiosity and brought along one of his Lacorde Statement power cables to connect to the Keces power supply that supplied the clock. We tried this out on the linear power supply, which is just a tenth of the price of the power cable: With it, the SOtM combo even sounded a touch better. For obvious reasons, I haven’t published anything about this experiment so far. But, once you hop on the highest expansion stage of Ansuz' digital signal distribution, you have nothing left to lose. And I might as well confess that even the phasing of Goebel's power cord had been audible. When it comes to such shared experiences, my colleague Roland Dietl uses to say, "The extremely high resolution of a system certainly isn’t a blessing at all." But it’s tremendously helpful if you want to know what is technically or sonically feasible.

Now that the splendid Jeff Rowland combo is on the way back to its distributor, I finally ended up in enjoying a bunch of records again and all the digital components are getting their power from Audioquest’s Niagara 1200, I find that it's time to busy myself with the Digitalz D-TC Supreme Ethernet cables. Since they were designed for use with a PowerSwitch or a PowerBox, I will only listen to them with the respective AC power source connected. To do this, I connect the thin four-pole cable supplied with the D-TC Supreme to one of the sockets on the PowerSwitch, which previously had proven its enormous abilities in conjunction with the Goebel Lacorde Statement Ethernet. The first D-TC Supreme therefore replaces the Goebel counterpart between switch and router: Immediately, I take pleasure in a bit more of thrust in the low frequency range. The tonal balance gets slightly relocated, the sonic image now appears a bit warmer and more rounded. And best of all: The superb spatial imaging and the enormous attention to detail are not prone to suffer from this venture at all.

Before I spend too much time pondering whether the now minimally muted high frequency range within the playback might cause a meticulous loss of freshness, I swap the cable between Melco and PowerSwitch. Subjectively, the set plays two or three beats per minute faster, while the bass hasn’t lost any of its power and the highs delight with a bit more airiness, being neither accompanied by roughness nor dissected by excessive analysis. Now I can enjoy that dram of more pressure in the lows without having the sonic balance shifted. While searching for a test piece to accomplish the last cable swap, namely the one between switch and Auralic Aries G1, I get stuck on Arild Andersen's album If You Look Far Enough and its track "If You Look": incredibly dense percussion, spacey synth sounds and bass. I've never heard the small bells, bigger bells and the rest of the brass as nuanced as now. The low drums in the second half of the track – as played through the Goebel Epoque Aeon Fine – unfold with yet heard impact, while the sound layers extend widely and deeply into the room. Beware, for a meaningful comparison, this impressive well over three minute long sound spectacle is simply too complex. Thanks to the PowerSwitch and the two Ansuz Ethernet cables, and even on the third or fourth listen, I would certainly still discover one or two detail bits here and more intense or even new tonal colours there.